


Gratitude

by owlbsurfinbird



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Desert, Gen, Ghosts, Intense, Introspection, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-02
Updated: 2014-10-02
Packaged: 2018-02-19 14:16:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2391401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlbsurfinbird/pseuds/owlbsurfinbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gazing across the desert, he thought he might be seeing heart fires—the ghosts of immigrants who had perished trying to cross the border into the US. The locals said the cries of the children were the worst, so thirsty. <em>They lure you from your bed, gabacho. Follow their laughter and you are miles from water. Suck you dry like Santana winds.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Gratitude

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Small_Hobbit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Small_Hobbit/gifts).



James was grateful for the gritty sand beneath his hand that enabled him to slide the brick into place. He was grateful for the calluses that had built up quickly on his palm, so splinters from the bare wood handle of the trowel wouldn’t find their mark. He was grateful that he could still bend low to pick up another brick and another and another.  


He supposed he should be grateful that his gloves were the only thing taken from his room.  


Each brick, the mission worker told him, can be a thing, a person, a thought. Imagine, as you work, that you are laying these difficulties to rest as a foundation for something new, something strong. Dig deep, find solace in the work.  


He had dug deep. Three feet down per an ancient blueprint in French—the reason he was here, 80 miles from Tijuana, Mexico—the previous workers had been French engineers. Decades ago they had built a clinic to serve the cluster of small villages that surrounded a lake. Climate change had taken the lake and drug lords had taken the villages. In broken Spanish--hastily learned--he had directed the handful of laborers from one of the villages to dig in drought-hard sand a foundation to re-build the bullet-ridden walls of a small clinic.  


He had traveled well over five thousand miles to get away from violence and here he was, removing it from the walls and the lives of the people in this hot, arid desert community.  


The laborers came shortly before dawn and left before noon, the stupefying heat too much for them. In the cool evening, the wind shifted so that it traveled the arroyos and the shrieks and moans sounded like the screams of the clinic volunteers who had been shot, execution style, against the cinder block walls.  


The first day had been tearing down the blocks and discarding those that were too riddled with bullets. This went on for two days—separating the bricks into piles. Then came the crushing blows of a sledge hammer to break them down.  


He patched the slightly damaged bricks with mortar. Discarded those with blood stains, beating them down with the sledge hammer. Returning them to the earth.  


He was grateful, he told himself. Grateful that most had lived. Grateful that he had not been a witness. Grateful that he had not had to bury the dead or carry their names with him, as did all other names.  


Grateful.  


The old site is haunted, the men told him. You hear it in the wind and feel it in the earth.  


They moved the bricks and pipes to a new site using a new black heavy duty SUV. The interior was black, an oven in the heat. The speakers were loud and tuned to a station playing old rock and roll in English. They said they had to drive the SUV around the site occasionally to ‘keep the battery going.’  


He suspected they liked being in the SUV and running the air conditioning. They’d take off for hours, returning at night fall with mortar, shovels.  


He was grateful that he was not invited.  


One day the SUV did not return.  


He envisioned himself spending his remaining days out in the middle of the desert. He’d mummify in the heat, he thought. He’d try to arrange his body so that it would be pleasantly denuded by the heat, sand, wind. He could do that much. Imagined he’d put on his hat at a jaunty angle, that he’d try to refrain from smoking his last cigarette so that it would remain between bony fingers, striking a devil may care attitude when they found him at last.  


He wouldn’t die, of course. There was water—a well a half mile away with muddy ground water. He had a filter and sanitation tablets—the water had a metallic taste, but it was cold and wet. He had food which he was careful to keep packed away from packrats, coyotes. He had few books and a single pack of cigarettes. He did not have a mobile or alcohol. He had left his guitar in Lewis’ care.  


He didn’t know which he missed more: the man or the instrument.  


He slept on a cot in one of the old adobe outbuildings. It had a cracked terra cotta floor that was cool against his bare feet. He’d been cautioned not to go barefoot: scorpions, rattle snakes, spiders, and lizards shared the desert around his habitat. He kept his shoes turned over so that whatever crawled into them at night would be shaken out when he grabbed them in the morning. Propane stove, MREs, flats of bottled water for drinking should the well run dry in a seismic event.  


“Earth movements,” said the social worker who brought him to the site, “We had a geologist out here for a month or so, measuring the Laguna Salada fault. The equipment’s in the other building.”  


An aging seismograph sat unused in a corner. A thermometer on the wall read 97 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside. It was late afternoon. A selection of elevation maps, USGS binders, Tom Clancy paperbacks without their covers. A hand gun, barrel empty, carelessly left on a rickety shelf. The social worker did not comment on the firearm, but explained: “He had to relocate the village dump—it was leaking into the groundwater, poisoning the well. The Red Cross came out to take blood samples—children throughout the area had high levels of lead. Birth defects, developmental delays. It was the dump. Had nothing to do with chemical spills from the meth labs down the road.”  


“Meth labs.”  


She shrugged. Sweat matted her grey curly hair to her lined, weathered face. She wore a wide brimmed hat, dangly earrings, and hiking clothes and shoes. She smiled apologetically as if nothing could be done. “I’ll be back in six weeks. Someone from El Centro will be down to check on you in two weeks, take you into town to get supplies, make calls.” She glanced pointedly at the gun on the shelf. “I expect to find you hale and hearty.”  


“What happened to the geologist?”  


“Nothing.” She shook his hand. “Finish the outer walls so the locals come back.”  


This was his mission.  


Each brick was a thing. He consecrated each brick of the building with a discarded notion. The foundation would be built of the things he felt he no longer needed: cigarettes, alcohol, fashionable clothes, signed hardcover books, updated phones, all of it. The need for all worldly good set to rest.  


Next, came the people. So many people. Each case, each body. How many other officers attended the funerals of crime victims, he wondered? He had managed to attend most of them—certainly all of the children and young people, the old and the sick. Knew all their names. The last one was Adam.  


It all came down to Adam.  


Adam—a beginning. A opportunity to start anew. The bricks sprang into his hand as he thought of Adam, what he could have done differently to prevent the young man from hanging himself. He played it over and over in his mind, his thoughts churning, mixing like mortar in a white plastic tub. What he said, what Adam said. The image of the boy—red faced, near tears, insecure and inadequate about his relationship with his girlfriend—spent all night crying her arms, Adam said.  


The admission that he had comfort where Hathaway had none—it unleashed something in Hathaway that he had held tight inside—a fist waiting to strike. His rage, his frustration cracked like a whip, flogging the young man.  
\-- who was hardly up to the emotional task of pulling it all together.  


And it wasn’t just the case.  


It was everything. 

“It’s strange,” Lewis had said of his new relationship with Laura.  


“Good strange?” James had asked, not sure why he wanted to know.  


“Yeah,” Lewis had been surprisingly enthusiastic.

Because he hurt, James had bullied that young man who then took his own life. Bullied him into tying a rope around his neck. It was what he believed, he told Lewis. A belief—in anything—is an emotional construct, not a logical one.  


I can’t help the way I feel, he told Lewis.  


Then he thought of Lewis, who had tried, with his understanding and his accepting silence, to help Hathaway work through the sense of failure, hopelessness. Of believing that he had taken a life.  


Tried to help him by getting him to focus on the future.  


A future without Lewis at his side.  


A future where Lewis would have Laura in his heart, where Lewis would have his hands working the earth instead of sifting through case reports. A future where time spent with Hathaway was a pint on Fridays after work and maybe an occasional lunch special.  


A bleak future, in short. One that was difficult for James to contemplate.  


He was grateful he could contemplate this future without witnesses. Grateful that no one saw him cry or silently rage at his immaturity. He railed at himself to ‘Get over it!’  


Because he wanted to leave Oxford, desperately wanted to leave, to give up, wanted to do something easier, more pleasant.  


Lewis said he wanted him to do what he thought was best . Said he would understand if Hathaway didn’t want to be an Inspector. Said he’d understand if James left the Force. 

But James felt underlying all of it was the unspoken, ‘You can do this. Don’t give up. I believe in you.’  


So much between them was unspoken.  


Hathaway no longer believed in himself. He was as broken as Adam. And while he would never contemplate the taking of his own life, he didn’t know how to reconcile the belief that he had taken someone else’s life.  


As Hathaway left on unpaid leave, he explained he needed time, needed a break.  


Needed to see if he’d crumble if Lewis wasn’t there.  


He’d gotten weak around Lewis. He’d allowed this man to invade his carefully constructed walls of privacy and silence.  


Over his lifetime, James variously imagined himself to be a castle, a citadel, Masada—impenetrable, solid—aloof. But Lewis had chipped away at his foundation by making him care when he no longer wanted to. Lewis had broken him down to make him a better person.  


Hathaway was a ruin, as much as these bricks. He had no one now, not even Lewis.  


He was grateful he could re-build himself, fortify himself.  


Each brick was an instance, a touch, a glance from Lewis that would not be reciprocated, he now knew. He needed to bury that hope deep. He had to bury those feelings, wall them up again.  


He was grateful he was being given the opportunity to protect himself from hurt and pain.  


He thought then of each victim whose face had stared up at him from a case file, each stabbing, each poisoning, each wrongful death brought on by greed or lust or passion. And he willed himself to be free of these governing emotions.  


What he felt for Lewis, too, was carefully, lovingly, buried. Like the tiny bits of olive green plants that had subsisted out here on nothing but heat, sunlight and a brief rain, he had nurtured his affection for Lewis. Waiting patiently for a flood, a torrential downpour to bring it to flower.  


There are plants in the high desert of the southwest Americas that shed their seeds in fires whipped by fierce winds. The seeds will germinate in the next rain which may not occur for decades.  


James was tired of waiting. His feelings had been ignited by fire, that moment where he was visited in hospital by a man who accepted him, who had braved fire for him. The intervening years—the casual glance, the shared space on a couch on the weekend, the quips—all of these were gone in that instant when he had turned his back for ‘five minutes’ and returned to find a relationship in full flower.  


As it should be.  


He was grateful that Lewis had Laura.  


He was. To see them together, to see the light in her eyes and the way he lit up when she looked at him.  


He could not look at Lewis and hope. Would not.  


He was prickly, like the shriveled barrel cactus at the corner of the old clinic wall. People kept their distance. Always had. Except for Lewis, who seemed to seek him out.  


In an arid environment, a succulent can survive for years, becoming a dry nest of twigs waiting patiently for rain. It does not suffer. It exists. It waits. It withstands desiccation. It goes dormant.  


It does not bloom, but it survives. A life without beauty.  


James had seen so much ugliness over the last seven years, he ached for beauty. He wanted to listen to the bells of Oxford once again without hearing Jonjo ask, ‘What do you love?’ He wanted to see a sunset on the Cherwell without seeing a corpse along the banks. He wanted, most of all, to believe that people were inherently good again.  


Each brick was an idea, a thought, a prayer.  


He built strong tall walls with mortar that colored his hands and polished the calluses so that they became hard and shiny in the sun. His skin, red and flaming in the heat, reminded him of his pain—he relished it as moving through it made him stronger. Pain is weakness leaving the body.  


He had allowed himself to mellow in Lewis’ shadow. Allowed his mind to meander. Allowed his discipline to wane. Allowed himself to hope, to love. He had wanted to be part of a whole. Now that he wasn’t, he was a part—in pieces.  


He was grateful to be given the means to become whole again.  


Grateful.  


He relished the solitude, though his Walden was less of a pond and more of a sand pit. Each day, he carefully noted his activities, documenting his thoughts, his visitors. The locals, of course, whose visits became more sporadic as the temperature rose. Several lizards who lived in the shade of the stone that served as a step into his room. He studied the US Geological Survey maps that had been left behind by someone who posed as a geologist.  


Someone who had moved a dump closer to an underground aquifer.  


He listened to the sounds of the night winds and realized that the rumblings and shrieks might be the sounds of heavy machinery and cutting steel far beneath his feet. He eschewed artificial light in the evenings so that he could watch the stars sans light pollution. Congratulated himself on getting in touch with nature. So many stars.  
It was the reason he saw the caravan, miles away, a line of red lights following each other across the desert, stopping and starting at intervals. Vehicles without headlights.  


Drug caravan.  


Local drug lords had been battling it out since 2006. Just months before his arrival, the US Drug Enforcement Agency had shut down a tunnel from Tecate, Mexico to a farmhouse in San Diego County, California. Miles of desert, monitored by drones and the occasional Border Patrol car.  


Gazing across the desert, he thought he might be seeing heart fires—the ghosts of immigrants who had perished trying to cross the border into the US. The locals said the cries of the children were the worst, so thirsty. They lure you from your bed, gabacho. Follow their laughter and you are miles from water. Suck you dry like Santana winds.  


The social worker who had driven him out here was part of a ministry that left water jugs throughout the desert along foot paths traveled by coyotes. There was no thought of gain or thanks, nothing but the hope that what was left might be used by another in need. The simplicity appealed to him.  


So many perished in the desert. At twilight especially, he felt as if he was seeing spirits, though he knew it was only the heat shimmering off the earth, distorting reality. He understood the Mexican fascination with death—out here the veil between this world and the next was translucent. One minute a mantilla, the next minute a shroud.  


He faithfully recorded the sensation of being watched, attributed it to changing air pressure. Clouds were forming over the distant hills. The wind had picked up: dry sage rubbing against the building sounded exactly like the sound of a rope rasping against a pipe, swinging a heavy weight.  


Such a heavy weight.  


He went to bed early. And awoke—paralyzed—staring at her.  


Zelinski.  


He couldn’t move. His heart hammered in his chest. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t blink.  


“You found me.”  


Too late, he thought. I was too late, forgive me. Four days too late. Tears seeped from the corners of his eyes. He was rigid, unable to move. I’m sorry, God help me, so sorry.  


“You found me.”  


Her hair was wet. Her clothes were muddy from the low water in the cistern. Ten years old. Dead four days. The smell of mold and decay filled his nostrils as it had that day.  


Lightning streaked the sky. Thunder shook the room.  


He was alone. He shuddered, sitting up, the heels of his hands digging into his eyes.  


It started to rain.  


He got up, stumbling over his shoes in the dark, and stood at the door, breathing deeply to calm himself. The air smelled of petrichor and ozone.  


He heard a distant scream, and then another. Is this how she screamed, he wondered. He imagined her terror.  


Thunder again, the rain heavier now. The screaming—more insistent.  


And in Spanish.  


He grabbed for his shoes and set off in the rain toward the shrieks, walking quickly at first, and then breaking into a run, slipping in the mud as the rain pounded down around him.  


He could hear them more clearly, now. He stood for a moment, getting his bearings, straining to hear over the sound of rushing water. Dry stream beds were filling and flowing, the ground too dry to take in the water. No one in sight.  


A boulder stood alone, an improbable marker, in a stream bed, in the middle of nowhere.  


He saw water disappearing beneath the rock, rushing into a round grate. The screams came from underground.  


“Let me help,” he shouted, hoping his Spanish was adequate. “Can you hear me?” He hadn’t brought a torch. Fast water, knee high, pushed him toward the grate. “Can you hear me?”  


He heard a reply, garbled.  


Wind whipped the rain into sheets. He grabbed the rock for support, trying not to be knocked over by the force of the water flowing into the grate, the metal grid now invisible in a flood of mud, water, and sand.  


He couldn’t hear anything now. Panicked, he reached down into the torrent, grabbed onto metal and pulled against the swirling flood. He wrenched the metal grate from the earth, feeling a pop in his shoulder and back. He reached down and felt a hand.  


A small hand clutched his own.  


He struggled to get a better grip, his two hands holding onto a forearm, and he pulled.  


A thin boy, about ten or eleven, bounded up through the water. “There are others,” he yelled. “Down there!”  


Hathaway got on his knees, bracing himself as the muds and sand around the hole seemed to collapse into it. He reached down, moving his arm.  


Another touch of fingers, then gone.  


He bent further into the hole, the rain pounding his back. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear anything except the screams. He stretched onto his belly, took a deep breath, and plunged into the stream, his arm going deep. Fingers scratched at his arm. He reached.  


Got him! He pulled, two handed, at an awkward angle. The boy emerged, coughing and sputtering.  


“Anyone else?” He asked.  


“Dead,” the boy sobbed, clinging to Hathaway’s arm.  


Hathaway sat heavily against the rock, one boy in his lap, the other holding fast to his arm, and let the rain wash over him.  


Two lives saved.  


He felt a sense of peace wash over him, as much as the water and mud that he sat in were ritually cleansing him, almost a mikveh, as much as the rain that beat the hard earth.  


Gratitude.

“Leaving on an up note,” the social worker observed. “New duds?”  


He shrugged, not wanting to tell her that he had burned the old ones, as was customary at the end of a pilgrimage. Didn’t mention the ritual bath he’d taken at dawn, standing naked in the morning sun pouring water over his head.  


She smiled broadly. “You saved a life. Two, in fact.”  


Hathaway nodded. It didn’t make up for the lives he hadn’t saved, but for now, it was enough. The boys had been helping the machines dig another tunnel for the drug lords. 

Children were brought in because they were small and could wriggle into the crevices to set small explosive charges to loosen the granite. There were always children willing to work in the tunnels.  


And the people of the village were happy to supply their offspring for these paying jobs. It was when the children were no longer able to follow directions that they began to have problems.  


“They had all these kids who couldn’t focus, who couldn’t do the work. When they found out about the dump, they had to execute the volunteers and the kids who had the evidence in their bloodstreams.”  


“What will happen to the boys?”  


She shrugged. “Oh, rehabilitation. A good education. Is that what you want to hear?”  


“Yeah,” he said. “Will they be okay?”  


“You saved their lives, James.” She smiled slightly. “I hear you lectured them, too, about how the choices they make define their character.”  


“Miguel thought it was funny. My dictionary didn’t have the phrase, ‘Pinche puto pendejo baboso,’ though I found some of the words. What does being a cook have to do with--” his held up his hand.  


“Oh.” She bit her lower lip and raised her eyebrows. “Pinche is an adjective for the ‘f’ word,” she looked at the ground. “It’s over the top, as far as profanities go, but I think Lucas listened. It was good that you made him help you finish the wall.” She looked at him over the top of her car. “So. You’re a police officer.”  


“Detective Inspector as soon as I pass the exam.” Hathaway hoisted his backpack into the backseat of her car. The boot was filled with plastic jugs of water—he’d help her leave them out along the way as they left the high desert. He was getting into the car when he saw it—  
\--the first flower of torrential rain. A brilliant yellow bud sprouted from the cactus at the corner of the wall, the succulent bracts now so full you could hardly see the prickles.  


He smiled to himself, feeling whole again. Strong.  


Grateful.


End file.
